I attended the Tampa Code Camp this past weekend. It was located at the Kforce Building in Tampa, a very nice facility, good parking, and only a couple blocks from downtown Ybor City (lots of stuff to do) - this is also where the Tampa SQLSaturday will be held in January 2009. Attendance looked to be around 200-220, which seemed to be down somewhat from previous years but still easily a success.

I did a presentation on how statistics affect performance in SQL. The 'room' I was assigned was one half of the cafeteria, another presenter had the other half. Looking at it I was expecting to have everyone struggle to hear/understand, but the layout brought the attendees in closer than usual and the noise turned out to not be a factor. If anything, having attendees within normal conversational distance made it less formal and more fun.

Only a single SQL track (not unusual) but I think we (sql speakers) probably need to have a better focus on what SQL content we do at these events. Just as at any of these events the skill levels and interests vary widely, but I think they fall into two main groups; those that don't have a DBA and so need some coaching on routine DBA tasks (not uncommon to find out they do zero index maintenance), and those that want to understand performance/security together. I think SQL injection should just always be on the agenda!

As always I had some good conversations. Some related to PASS that I'll post separately, I talked with Jonathan Kehayias about career plans & consulting, Bayer White  (new blog URL) has taken over the Jacksonville .Net Users Group and the related Code Camp so we talked about running user groups and events, talked with Pam Shaw of the Tampa SQL Group about how she was going to organize the facility for SQLSaturday, talked with Joe Healy about Bizspark, and more!

Biggest complaints: materials for attendees weren't pre-stuffed in the event bags, and the lunch line for pizza wasn't well organized.

Finished up the day with a late lunch at The Green Iguana - if you're in Tampa you should try their Baja Burger!

Last event of the year here in Florida. I'll be heading to the Tampa Code Camp to do a presentation on statistics in SQL Server, and I'll be at a sponsor table for the day on behalf of both End to End Training and JumpstartTV. This is typically a good event, curious to see if the Dec date helps or hurts - they had to change from the typical summer date due to size restrictions at the originally planned site. I'm looking forward to sitting in on a .Net session or two, I enjoy SQL but it's nice to see what's going on in related areas.

I'm a couple weeks last posting this, but wanted to get my notes down anyway for future use. The goal of the event was 300 attendees, my guess (unconfirmed) was about 100 actual attendees, this due primarily to the hurricane that had just visited the area and having the location of the event change only 2 days prior to the event. The people I saw at the event were having their usual good time so on that level it was a success. Overall I thought the event suffered some from the change in leadership of the Jax .Net Group that happened last year and there is a learning curve to these events!

• Event leadership did a good job keeping everyone updated as to go/no-go as far as the storm. Can't stress enough that daily updates - even without a storm - are critical the week prior to the event
• The planned location cancelled two days prior to the event due to the storm, leaving them with the choice of rescheduling the event (which I think I preferred as an option) or moving to an alternate location. Due to financial commitments for the after event party cancelling wasn't a viable option so they moved about 12 miles to a church. No good answers here, you just do the best you can when conditions suck.
• Check in went smoothly, all attendees received a tshirt.
• Session locations were a mess. Due to the location change plan A was to poll those who arrived on Sat and set room assignments based on popularity, this plan was eventually discarded as too time consuming and new rooms were mapped to old rooms. It was a confusing layout and a great bit of ingenuity was to have someone lead groups to each room at the start of each hour - nice save.
• Sponsors were pretty much ignored until lunch time. This was a combination of not having a good traffic flow (usually you want sponsors between check-in and breakfast/lunch) and the event stuff just trying to make everything else happen due to the location change. Unavoidable, but can't stress enough that you need someone tasked with looking after sponsors and sponsor interests.
• I left prior to the close out session, but the plan was to give away all the books/prizes at one time. What we've seen at SQLSaturday is that this doesn't scale well, may have worked out ok with the smaller crowd - in my view prize tickets/prize desk that lets winners redeem during the day is a better solution.
• The event raised more than $12k. Good money, but once you get beyond $4k or so I think it would be nice to make sure members/attendees get some view of where/how that money is being spent. Here in Orlando if we can raise a surplus we plan to use it to support bringing in out of town speakers during the year.
• One other thing they tried and then abandoned was having attendees vote on which sessions should be on the schedule. I love the idea, but implementing it makes life challenging. It's the job of the event team to come up with a balanced schedule and the attendees/registrants may not help you achieve that. I know that's a confusing statement, but these are meant to be general community events - you don't want all beginners or all expert sessions or you leave out a large bit of the community.

Somewhat harshly, this is the 2nd year that the Jax event has been so-so, compared to the Orlando/S Fla/Tampa Code Camps. I hope the Jax team will take a look at those other events in Fla and their own recent experiences to make next years event first class again.

Just had a note from John Magnabosco, the schedule for the event on Oct 4, 2008 has been published. I'll be there doing a presentation on Replication, Steve Jones is doing one on Green Computing, and I see Kevin Kline has two on the agenda as well.

This is a true community event, with content on .Net, Sharepoint, Enterprise Development, and more - about 36 sessions so far. Hope to see you there!

Although attendance was down this year (around 280 attendees) due to it being held Easter weekend, I thought this was easily the best of the Orlando Code Camps so far. More volunteers, better logistics, and definitely a great site (same as we used for SQLSaturday#1 in Orlando) all combined to make it a first class event. Kudos to ONETUG leader Shawn Weisfeld, Jessica Sterner, Fabio Honigmann, and the rest of the volunteers for doing great work and providing a terrific service to the community.

Saw a lot of old friends and made some new ones, too numerous to list but here are a few; Roy Lawson (Lakeland .Net Users Group), Kathy Malone (great talk about organizing and sustaining community events), John Pharris from Comsys, Jack Corbett, Ryan Dorrell from Agilethought in Tampa, Jim Wooley (Linqman and part of the Atlanta .Net Group), Michael Webb from Cybreze (DNN master), Diego Samuilov, Wes Dumey, former student Jeff Mullen, upcoming student Cassandry Nealy.

As always, I pay a lot of attention to logistics, looking for ideas that will help make the SQLSaturday format more successful (and which we share back with ONETUG), so here are the ones from this time:

• The day started a bit weird because the security guard had instructions that no extension cords could be used. The facility has no wall or floor outlets in the sponsor area. Finally had to get the facility manager to come to the site who insisted on the rule, after more discussion the head of maintenance arrived and clarified what would work (a mininum number of cords, all tied off and taped down, and surge protectors used. The facility also decreed that we could not use blue painters tape to affix stuff to the wall. After some heated discussion they agreed that we could use the gummy tack strips. As it's the third time that we've used the facility for a community related event you would think all of this would have materialized sooner; the impression we get is the facility manager sees her job as protecting the facility at all costs, even if that means no one uses it! Not sure what the lesson is, but the ideal is to have the site sponsor actively and happily involved whatever it takes, not get into an adversarial relationship...if you can help it!
• Shawn came up with a great idea for managing books. Wrox, Apress, and MS Press have all been great community supports, there were easily over a 100 books to give away. At past events they have been raffled off at the end of the day, turning it into a 45 minute marathon that no one enjoys. Shawn gave each speaker 3 book tickets with instructions to give them away during their session using whatever criteria they wanted; best question, first arrival, etc. Winners took their ticket to the 'prize desk' to redeem their book. The tickets were for a specific book, I think it would have been slightly better if they could just choose from what was available. Totally a win though; good for attendees, and good for speakers too (though because the system was new, many speakers forgot to give them out until the end of the session)
• There were a lot of other raffle items, I think we're all missing out by not advertising them on the event site in advance. Lots of software in addition to the books, and several more expensive prizes including the One Laptop Per Child laptop that we (End to End Training) provided.
• There weren't enough sponsors on site. This was mostly attributed to some delays the event team ran into during planning, but it was definitely a missed opportunity, both for sponsors and for funding the event.
• One nice thing they did was provide each sponsor (onsite or virtual) a box for their raffle tickets. All the vendors that weren't physically present were all set up on one table, attendees could just walk by and drop in their tickets. Very nice.
• I'd like to see first time attendees identified - maybe a different color badge. I saw more than a few that looked a bit lost/overwhelmed/nervous, wouldn't be a bad idea to pair them up with someone.
• Shirts for the event speakers and volunteers were green. Good enough shirts, they just didn't stand out from the crowd very well.
• I'd also like to see the speakers more visible. Quite a few seemed to spend hours in the speaker ready room working on their presentations. I think they are missing out on a great chance to interact more, and presentations written an hour before delivery often aren't the greatest. Maybe a speaker table in the main lobby where every speaker has to do 30 minutes, just answer questions, etc, would be a nice way to give them more visibility without making it a hardship.
• Even with the books gone the raffle at the end of the day went slowly. Many of the software sponsors were giving away 5 or 10 licenses, takes time and strangely enough, just trying to pronounce the names of the winner often slows people down. Might be useful to give everyone an attendee id so that someone can yell #177 instead of trying to say a very complicated name. Also need a better system to track winners; easy if they can collect right then, but many of the prizes require that the email address be sent to the vendor so the key can be sent back. In particular we did a bad job of this at SQLSaturday Orlando.
• The event finished up a little earlier than expected, about 5;15, and the after party was due to start at 6:30 with the food not available until 7. As you might expect this really lowered attendance, when I left about 7:15 there were perhaps 20 attendees there, primarily volunteers and speakers. The after event needs to be immediately after or it's not going to succeed as while as it might.

Great event, and some of the conversations helped me better form a couple ideas that I've been working on, will try to blog in more detail later this week.

I've been emailing back and forth with IndyTechfest organizer John Magnabosco over the past year as we've traded notes about running community events, so when he invited me to attend as a speaker it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go see first hand how they do things. I've never been to Indianapolis either, so it should be an interesting trip.

I attended the South Florida Code Camp this past Saturday and it turned out to be quite an event. More than 600 attendees arrived to watch 72 sessions spread across 12 tracks! That's just an incredible amount of variety and opportunity. I presented Transactional Replication for Beginners and had a good sized crowed for a .Net centric event, about 30 attendees, that asked some really good questions. My friend Chris Rock did a presentation on Linq to SQL (more on Linq in an upcoming post!) that had more than 70 attendees, it's clearly a hot topic among developers.

We (End to End Training that is) sponsored the speaker party on Friday night and that was a lot of fun, got to meet a lot of new people outside of my usual Orlando circle. We had some great conversations about the life of a DBA, Linq, HTTP endpoints, and more. Very nice group of people! We started about 5 pm and wrapped up about 9 pm, then ended up talking for another hour to a bunch of speakers that ended up staying at the same hotel we did. We did a raffle on Saturday for people that came by our table to chat and gave away a very nice 22" flat panel monitor. We had hoped to be raffling off the OLPC laptop we ordered, but it had not arrived yet and besides, what geek doesn't lust for a bigger monitor?